2. “THE DARK KNIGHT”
BARKER: Justin, when we first started this list — five or six years years ago, it feels like — I referred to “The Dark Knight” as the greatest comicbook movie ever made, and I suppose I should elaborate on that a bit. I don’t believe I’m alone in that opinion, and champions of the film have alternately praised it for elevating the comicbook narrative to the level of serious art, or for being the rare comicbook film to take comics seriously. Both schools of thought seem a little wrongheaded to me. Comicbooks are one of the defining American artforms of the past century, and thus always worth taking seriously. And what’s more, plenty of prior filmmakers have attempted to imbue superhero movies with a degree of seriousness and moral inquiry. What Nolan did better than anyone before or since, however, was to find the perfect cinematic correlative for classic comics’ particular brand of pop mythology, embracing the source material’s pulpiness and its profundity in equal measure.
“The Dark Knight” was also a resonant product of its time and place, and a fitting elegy for the George W. Bush era, when half a decade of war, terrorism, domestic surveillance and an overall air of moral relativism had made the ethical certainties of so many earlier superhero pics look hopelessly naive. (The secret of “The Dark Knight” is that its protagonist isn’t really Batman, it’s Harvey Dent, the once noble justice-seeker turned avenging monster.) It’s hard to imagine a film this pitilessly dark grossing more than a billion dollars in any previous decade, and for better or for worse, this is the film that has shaped the timbre of blockbuster action filmmaking ever since. Sometimes this feels like a strike against it, as even the once squeaky-clean Superman and Spider-Man films are now expected to dwell on the jagged edges, murky motivations, dark moods. One could blame Nolan for that, but to do so would be no fairer than blaming the Pixies for every loudQUIETloud indie band that flourished in the 1990s, or blaming Quentin Tarantino for the generation of grindhouse crate-diggers that followed in “Pulp Fiction’s” wake. If you nail something as perfectly as Nolan did with “The Dark Knight,” imitators are to be expected.
CHANG: Why mince words at this point? “The Dark Knight” is the greatest comicbook movie ever made, one of the finest sequels Hollywood ever produced, and the rare picture that meaningfully evokes the terror and trauma of 9/11 without tilting into exploitation (I’m lookin’ at you, “Man of Steel”
. And for all the film’s self-evident moral complexity and seriousness of purpose, what’s stayed with me most is the sheer energy and momentum that Nolan achieves over the course of two-and-a-half hours; he directs this thing like a man possessed, fully in control even when he seems to be running off the rails, flicking at our nerves a little harder with every scene. Coming on the heels of “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” wasn’t just a continuation but a furious acceleration of the narrative, plunging us from the relative calm of Bruce Wayne’s origin story into what felt like a Gotham City of perpetual night — a realm where, to quote the talking fox in “Antichrist,” chaos reigns.
Andrew, you nailed this earlier when you mentioned the film’s “ungovernable, irrational nihilism,” which pretty much sums up the ethos of the Joker, played by the late, great Heath Ledger in a performance that has rightly entered the kingdom of movie myth. The malevolent genius of “The Dark Knight” is that it seems to embody that ethos even when Ledger is offscreen, which is a surprising majority of the time (a reminder that even the best effects should be judiciously used). With its jackknife twists that seem to assault you from behind, its startling eruptions of violence and horror, the movie feels like something sculpted in the Joker’s demonic image — it’s as if Nolan had succeeded in bottling the very essence of criminal anarchy in narrative form. It’s understandable why he felt compelled to usher Batman out of the shadows with “The Dark Knight Rises,” and to bring back some of the lightness and levity we typically associate with comicbooks. But there’s a reason this picture remains the trilogy’s high point, and I think it’s because, on some level, Nolan dared himself to look evil in the face and make it not just scary, but exhilarating. He likes the darkness, and so do we.
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